Most business owners learn how DNS works on the worst possible day — when the site is down, the email has stopped, and someone is asking whether the A record was changed.
It is worth twenty minutes of calm reading beforehand. DNS records are not complicated once you see what each one is for.
The three separate things people conflate
This confusion causes more problems than any technical detail.
Your domain registrar is where you bought the name. They control who owns it.
Your DNS provider holds the records saying where traffic should go. This is often the registrar, sometimes the host, sometimes a third party like Cloudflare.
Your web host runs the server that stores your website.
These can be three different companies. Knowing which is which is the difference between a five-minute fix and an afternoon on hold with the wrong support desk.
The registrar is the one that matters most. Whoever controls the registrar account controls where your domain points, regardless of who hosts the site.
What DNS actually does
Domain names exist for humans. Computers use IP addresses. DNS is the directory that translates one into the other.
When someone types your address, their computer asks a DNS server where that domain lives, gets an IP address back, and connects to it. The whole exchange takes milliseconds and happens billions of times a day.
The records worth knowing
A record — where the website lives
Points your domain at a server's IP address. This is the one you change when moving hosts. Get it wrong and the site is unreachable.
MX records — where email goes
Completely separate from the A record, which is the single most important thing to understand here.
Your website can live with one company and your email with another. Changing your A record does not move your email — and deleting your MX records stops email dead while the website carries on working perfectly.
This is why migrations go wrong. People change hosting, DNS records get replaced wholesale, and email vanishes without the website showing any symptom.
CNAME — an alias
Points one name at another name rather than an IP. Commonly used for www, and for third-party services that give you a subdomain.
TXT records — verification and email authentication
Plain text used for several purposes. Services use them to verify you own the domain. More importantly, they hold your email authentication records:
- SPF — which servers may send email as your domain
- DKIM — a cryptographic signature on your messages
- DMARC — what receiving servers should do when checks fail
Without these, your legitimate email increasingly lands in spam folders. Our guide to contact forms not sending email covers why this matters more each year.
NS records — who is in charge
Nameserver records say which DNS provider holds the authoritative records. Change these and you move DNS control entirely — at which point the records at your old provider stop being used, however correct they look.
This catches people out constantly. Editing records at a provider that is no longer authoritative achieves nothing at all.
TTL: the setting that decides how fast changes happen
Every record has a time-to-live — how long other servers may cache it before checking again.
A TTL of 86400 means a full day before some visitors see your change. A TTL of 300 means five minutes.
The practical technique: lower the TTL 24 hours before a planned change, make the change, then raise it again once things have settled. This is what makes a host migration feel instant rather than taking a day. Our guide to migrating WordPress to a new host covers the full sequence.
The two disasters worth guarding against
Losing the domain
Domains expire. Renewal notices go to whatever email is on the registrar account — frequently a former employee, or a developer who set it up years ago.
Once expired, a domain enters a redemption period with recovery fees, and after that anyone can register it. Domains have been lost permanently this way, and there is often no remedy.
Three protections: enable auto-renewal, keep a payment method current, and make sure the contact email is one you actually monitor. Also enable registrar lock, which prevents unauthorised transfers.
Not controlling your own domain
If your domain is registered under a developer's or agency's account, you do not fully own your website — regardless of who paid for it. If that relationship ends badly, recovery ranges from slow to impossible.
Check today whose name is on the registrar account. Our guide to auditing an inherited website covers establishing this properly.
Before you change any record
- Screenshot the current records so you can restore them
- Change only what needs changing. Do not replace the whole set
- Leave MX records alone unless you are deliberately moving email
- Lower the TTL a day in advance for anything planned
- Test afterwards — website and email, not just the website
That second point prevents most incidents. "Replace these records with ours" is common advice from hosts, and following it literally is how MX records get deleted.
The security angle
DNS is worth protecting properly, because control of it means control of everything.
Someone who takes over your registrar account can point your domain anywhere, intercept your email, and obtain certificates in your name. It bypasses every protection on the website itself.
Enable two-factor authentication on the registrar account and on your DNS provider. Both belong on the list in our two-factor setup guide alongside WordPress admin — and honestly the registrar matters more.
If this is not where you want to spend your attention
DNS is fine until it is urgent, and then it is stressful precisely because email and website are both affected and the fix is not obvious.
Our managed website plans include DNS and certificate management, plus domain expiry monitoring — so a renewal notice going to the wrong inbox never becomes a lost domain.
Get in touch if you are not sure who currently controls your domain. That is worth establishing before you need to know.
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